Raspberry Pi demos $25 PC running 1080p video, promises CD-quality audio | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi demos $25 PC running 1080p video, promises CD-quality audio

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149 pointsukdm108 comments

I teach middle school programming/computer classes. I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these. Right now it's cheap enough that I can tell the parents to buy one for their kids without a problem, and out of pocket it for those few of my students whose parents won't be able to afford it.

Then I can finally not have to deal with the full lockdown the school has on their PC lab.

What about input and display devices? Although school can afford buying some cheap keyboards, the displays are much more expensive and it's pretty hard to work without them.

I think the idea is that they're cheap enough to give to students to use at home, who can hook them up to TVs they already have

Kids don't have PCs to learn, but their parents have HD TV? Is USA really like this?

This lets the kids have their own PC to work on without any risk of screwing up the family PC, and at a trivial cost.

Installing programming tools on whatever PC the parents may have is not a reliable, trivial, or consistent process. Parents will be upset if it somehow the installation screws up the home computer.

And yes, for some households with limited income, they may have enough money for an HDTV _or_ a PC, but not both - and most households will have opted for the HDTV before the need for an adequate PC for classwork became an issue.

> Parents will be upset if it somehow the installation screws up the home computer.

You've understated this point. Kids should be encouraged to (educationally) do things that will screw up their computers, like attempting to build their own kernel. They shouldn't have to worry about getting beaten because mom can't play Farmville after they've been experimenting.

Sure, just like they should be encouraged to take the family car apart and put it back together to learn about mechanical engineering.

Yeah, that'll go over well.

Spend the $25 on a do-what-you-want-to-it R-pi already.

>they may have enough money for an HDTV _or_ a PC, but not both //

I'd suspect for those for whom it is genuinely a choice they could opt for a second hand TV and second hand PC instead and afford both. Getting hold of a PC if you really want one seems to be quite easy, even in my poor city¹ (we have things like shampoo on our Freecycle, I kid you not, single bottle) there are quite a few opportunities to get a full computer for free ... but you'll have to accept an old model (oh noes!).

That said how does this all fit in to the stats I keep seeing that say computer use in school doesn't improve grades.

Would love me some RaspberryPi however.

1 - relative to the wealthy developed country I live in

> That said how does this all fit in to the stats I keep seeing that say computer use in school doesn't improve grades.

Unless those grades are in computing, they aren't really relevant to this project.

The penetration rate between HDTVs and PCs are close. But just because there is a PC in the home, doesn't mean the kid can use it to learn (i.e. it may be a single PC for the whole family to use).

2010 HDTV US home penetration: 65% [1]

2006 PC US home penetration: 73% [2]

[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2010/05/03/dai...

[2] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/itfacts/us-pc-penetration-is-at-73...

1) It's got RCA outputs also; explicitly so it'll work with /any/ TV, including the 10-year old junker you picked up at a yardsale for $25.

2) As also noted below, the goal of this project is to produce a computer for children to learn about the computer itself. The low cost (presuming the parents are even buying it directly) means kids will be able to have their way with it without worrying about wrecking the family computer.

True, but I can get my hands on HDMI -> DVI converters. Used small LCDs are unbelievably cheap if you watch for surplus auctions (and are willing to buy a pallet of 25).

Where/how do you find a pallet of cheap LCD monitors?

GovDeals.com is a good place to start: http://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.CatSearch&myca...

If you do proceed with this, would you mind giving us updates? I'm curious how this would work and what the reactions would be.

Also, a question: How would you explain/handle the security implications (to the children and/or parents)? Is it something that can simply be handled with, "Here is the list software they'll be running -- This will stop them from using Facebook in class, etc.." or am I just making this too complicated?

The $25 model (which they describe as being aimed at education) doesn't have any built-in networking; so the only reason to be concerned about security is if they get a hold of a NIC and figure out how to connect it to a network (at which point they probably deserve bonus points :)

You, sir, are a linchpin. If all teachers had your passion, what a future we'd have. Keep it up.

Thanks, but I'm technically not a teacher. I started this last year in my kids school because they had computer classes and were only learning how to use Open Office. I realize they will need those skills, but I figured that I could at least give them some exposure to the joy of hacking/programming.

Volunteer dad...activate!

This is fantastic, but "1080p" can have a dramatic range of qualities. If Inglorious Bastards just fits on the 2GB card and is over 2 hours long then the bitrate will be around 2Mbit/s, which is probably not very good. (cf. ~25Mbit/s for BluRay).

I should also point out that depending on the quality of the encoder, the bitrate is also a bad way of measuring quality. But I believe it is more useful than just saying "1080p".

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+gigabytes+%2F+Inglour...

Damn you beat me too it.

Also its not even actually 1080p that video looks to be running in 2.40:1 (movie aspect ratio) so the height isn't taking up all the screen real-estate.

It is full 1080p, but that clip doesn't have content to the edge of the video frame, so you're seeing black bars at either side (which we are decoding, for what it matters!)

I may totally be missing something but 1080px should be the height. So if you're showing it at a movie resolution you're either at something like 2592x1080 which is actually better then 1080p (but kind of unlikely - very few monitors would support a screen res that high) or you're running at something like 1920x800 which is less then 1080.

Its still pretty slick, not sure what SOC you're using but for that kind of media playback it seems to be something in line with what we're seeing in a bunch of our Connected TVs

usually videos from actual film are a lower (or higher) aspect ratio that the resolution of the monitor. in the 1080p case most often you get less than the full height since it was recorded that way.

p.s. their platform support decoding full 1080p, that demo just included less height.

Actually if you look at Blu-ray, then in most cases those black bars you see, are encoded in the video. Blu-ray doesn't support other aspect ratios than 16:9 (and 4:3 legacy SD resolutions). So from video decoders point of view it's all 1080p even if some of those lines are just filled with black pixels.

Hi - I'm Liz from Raspberry Pi. What you can see in that vid isn't the whole of Inglorious Basterds, but just the trailer (which is why it fits on a small SD card) - we were playing it on a loop. The Raspberry Pi can play back full 25 megabit HDMI; it's part of our mobile phone SoC dividend.

Well in that case I'm even more impressed. It's a pity the article doesn't mention that. What's the frame rate?

It's a cine clip, so I think it was 24fps. We can decode 30fps, but it's actually quite hard to find content!

Do you have a reference for the technical details of this? Do you know how much power it draws? Are details like MTTF known? Where did you get the H264 decoder from?

Exciting stuff.

I'd be glad to generate some 30fps HD content (nothing fancy, just some CGI loops that will show the smoothness of video playback) in exchange for the ability to purchase the higher-end version sooner.

By mobile phone SoC dividend, that's the VideoCore discrete signal processor, right?

From what I can gather Pi has a BCM2763 (as a DSP co-processor to the an ARM, or standalone?) or BCM2835 (combining a DSP and ARM on one chip) ... wikipedia is a bit hazy. (edit: it's the BCM2835 DSP + ARM on a chip, according to the rasberrypi FAQ).

It's got hardware that's dedicated to doing things it's 700MHz ARM chip simply can't, like watching YouTube in fullscreen (obligatory http://xkcd.com/619/). It should be able to do anything a high-end mobile phone can do (except take calls), which is what most people want.

It might be a good deal cooler with a $2 wifi chip (though that might make it harder to manufacture), or a $10 wifi USB adaptor, but I guess you have to draw the line somewhere.

Congrats Liz, great little piece of kit!

Think we are seeing the start of a new uber cheap PC market. Almost zero cost. It will make a big difference in the developing world and I think will be a huge hit (at least amongst the tech geeks) in developed nations.

PS +1 on the comment for wifi in v2

I REALLY want one of these now - how much to get a unit NOW rather than waiting till you hit the $25 price point?

They're on an alpha unit at the moment IIRC. I'd expect it to cost a lot and to slow down final production for them to start trying to sell at this stage.

It's not a question of money. They are a UK charity and their 50 alpha boards are out amongst those who can provide the most benefit to the project.

Get in line behind the rest of us. :-)

Just to nitpick: HDMI is approx 10Gbit/s interface. If you are talking about decoding capabilities, then H.264 profile/level would be more useful metric, ie H.264 High Profile, Level 4 (which I think is what Blu-ray video usually is, or at least close to it).

It's a hardware decoder, right? So it's decoding capabilities are not really representative of it's general performance?

It's far more interesting to know what kind of level [1] the decoder supports. I'd guess it tops out at 4, though one might have hoped for full 1080p60 playback.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Levels

I think that realistically if you are looking for something like that, you already have your sights set firmly higher than a $25 device... for starters you'd need a decent screen and you'd probably like a nice set of speakers as well. I don't think you'd then go out and get a $25 device to enable the whole setup, but then again, I am not you...

Still, in future versions I'd imagine the SoC would get upgraded appropriately and you'd quite likely get that. And run it off batteries with your roll-out OLED screen that you just stick to any old surface, whack in a nice set of headphones and you're set! Great for camping (hah!)

The BCM2835 chipset can decode Level 4.1 H.264 which is an approximately a maximum resolution/fps of 1080p30 at about 60-70mbit/s.

So, Mr. Upton, what are your plans regarding making the SoC datasheet available for real hackers?

(Not that I have any hope that Broadcom would change its ways...)

I suspect Liz Upton is female.

I suspect the comment was addressed openly to this guy: http://www.raspberrypi.org/?author=1

I wonder about this too. Having the full technical documentation for the board, schematics, datasheets, etc. would seem to best serve the mentioned educational goals as well as giving you a wider open source audience which should help with ongoing development and maintenance.

Looks like there will be another user of this SoC coming to market relatively soon, from the original Microsoft Xbox hacker "bunnie":

The NeTV has a particularly high hack-value due to its integration of an FPGA; from the hacker’s perspective, it’s a cousin to the Rasberry Pi but with integrated wifi, HDMI pass-through and an FPGA. And a shiny plastic case for those who care about that! http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1847

Maybe by "cousin" he means similar market and actually a different SoC. Either way depending on price point it may be what the "hardcore" hacker crowd is hoping to get from the raspberry pi (whose target is more an introduction to computing / computer science)

The NeTV uses a Marvell SoC, so you're right that it's a somewhat distant cousin.

This looks really interesting. It appears to be designed specifically to do HDMI passthough, with the idea you run apps on top of video that is passing through the device (or that's how I read it anyway).

Combine that with the FPGA... I can imagine some really nice apps.

This thing will sell like hotcakes if they can keep the pricepoint the way it is now.

IF they can, it's going to make a lot of waves. IF.

We definitely can. Our BOM comes in well under the planned selling price, and we're totally confident of hitting the $25/$35 price points.

Very impressive, really. Will you be offering quantum discounts?

That's really incredible.

We're selling too close to cost to make any discounts workable, but we can discount on shipping if people buy lots in one go.

That's actually quite scary. If you sell 'close to cost' then your margins are going to be razor thin even with just a little overhead it might not be viable.

Beware of selling too cheap.

AFAICT they are a registered charity with the goal of promoting computer science education, so I suspect large profit margins matter less than if they were a business.

They don't need large profit margins, but they should try to have enough for an office and staff.

Profit is what you have after paying for costs, including staff.

I think they should increase the single unit cost to $45 or higher (49 or 63). Have it a vote on the main page so people feel like they have some input, the higher cost can support discounts for bulk buys and other non-profits (think give one get one). Explain the rational for the price increase on the poll. The geeks that are making single purchases can definitely pay the higher price. Have a discount kick in @ qty 10 or 20 (down to $35). The at cost (which is never really @ cost, ever) discount shouldn't kick in till either non-profit status or qty 100.

----

You are going to have a problem meeting demand. And some for profit shop is going to use these as digital signage and suck up all the supply. Beware of unintended consequences, everyone that buys them isn't going to be doing good in the world. Capitalism is faceless and cares about us much gravity or water.

----

Another option is to have a classroom in a box package where you sell 30, power supplies, keyboards and an app that runs on all operating systems so you can DD pre-canned images onto end user supplied SD cards (point them at preferred cards on newegg).

I think this is a terrible idea, unless that price only applied to buyers in first world countries. At $25 for the board + shipping to South Africa + power supplies I can afford twice the boards I would buy. And even at $25, I can't buy as many as I would actually need.

I plan on giving them to interested school kids from the local squatter camp (slum for non-South Africans) and hopefully teaching them a bit of programming and general computer skills. The charities that service these kids have a hard time getting them food, so getting them to shell out for computers (even at $25ea) is a complete non-starter.

Since I will be paying for every single one myself, and will be scrounging up the rest of the parts wherever I can, an extra $20 - $40 would make a massive difference to me.

Good points. Still, it would be terrible if they ended up not surviving because of pricing it too low. Even a charity has to somehow make ends meet and if they end up going out of business everybody loses. I really hope they can make it work at the price points indicated but I'd rather have them a bit more expensive than not at all.

Exactly my take as well. The organism needs to survive and 100% altruistic organisms don't. If they sell at a profit then they can grow and more low cost education can spread.

Then under my plan if you bought 10 you would get the discount. When you get the cheap nearly at cost price so do the people who won't be doing good in the world. How do you differentiate them? What if I put in an order 1000 and hoovered them all up for in store digital signage? I am preventing 1000 kids from getting access to education and Raspberry gets nothing in return.

How do you solve this problem?

Are you planning on making these available to the public at this price point?

I personally would be tempted to hang on to the $25 price point for non-profit/educational institutions, and sell them to the general public at $50 a pop.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really hoping you do. But I've been bit too many times before by vaporware, so until you actually ship, I'm going to continue saying 'IF'.

It looks like the Raspberry Pi Foundation is actually Broadcom. There's a Broadcom logo on their board, and this Eben Upton fellow appears to work for Broadcom: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ebenupton

My hunch is that they'll hit the low price point by selling it at a loss, with the expectation that it will be worth it in the long run as a marketing effort for Broadcom. That seems a little skeezy to me.

On the other hand, there could be a lot worse marketing efforts than flooding schools with cheap Linux boards.

[Edit: see response below from liz_upton, who convinces me I'm wrong. I do still think it's weird that they're "having a hell of a time" distinguishing themselves from Broadcom, but haven't tried removing the Broadcom logo from their product yet. If I were really a conspiracy theorist, I would point out the Broadcom logo is a sinc function, and the integral of sinc is pi. But that would be crazy!]

The Raspberry Pi foundation is not Broadcom - we're having a hell of a time getting that message out. We're an independent charity.

Our director does work for Broadcom, which meant that we were able to get a foot in the door to discuss buying chips from them in much smaller numbers than they're usually prepared to sell people (their normal sales to a single customer are in the tens of millions range) once we'd explained the aims of the charity. They did allow to use their parts library to make the alpha boards which you can see in the video. Outside that, we're not receiving any other help from them (we source all our own parts for the final boards). All of us have day jobs and are doing all our Raspberry Pi work on a volunteer basis because we believe it's a project that can make a real difference. (I'm volunteering full-time - I'm freelance, so I've been able to put other work aside for at least the rest of the year.)

We're not selling at a loss. This isn't a Broadcom marketing exercise. Our relationship with Broadcom is one of customer/supplier - and that's it.

thanks for clearing that up for us. hate it when people speculate wildly.

That's a reasonable explanation-- I'll take you at your word here. Thanks for your efforts to push Linux in education.

Would you consider open sourcing your design, so the rest of the community could build on your efforts?

There's no point - the SoC is not available to the general public. You cannot build this board, you can only buy it.

There is a lot to be learned from the design, even if you can't buy the SoC. Other chips may be compatible with existing footprints, and you could build extra features onto the current design.

Additionally, having a schematic would make OS development a lot easier. The information can be obtained from the currently published source code, or at $25 it would be cheap to sacrifice one to a hot-air gun and generate some schematics.

There is always a point, even if it isn't immediately obvious. People are curious and inventive and wonderful - they will surprise you! Just because you can't see somebody immediately being able to build this board, doesn't mean that the knowledge your work contains isn't useful, or won't be useful in the future.

Besides, you have no reason not to. Couldn't hurt, right? And it would make the open hardware community promote you even more.

Please seriously consider doing this. :)

That seems a little skeezy to me

Since when has it been wrong to promote your product by taking a loss?

I think loss leaders are fine. The skeezy part, to my mind, is a company representing themselves as an educational foundation.

However, liz_upton claims that they really aren't part of Broadcom, despite the logo on the board. If they're really just a bunch of volunteers supporting Linux in education, they have my support 100%.

Is the broadcom chip the only component not publicly available? I hope you're able to also reduce the Rascal Micro price to at least the same range.

I think that at even three times the price it will sell, at least like waffles.

The geek in me completely agrees with you.

But I also think that would miss the point of this being a charitable enterprise entirely.

Exactly.

The computing power and, if I had to guess, the bill-of-materials cost is probably roughly equal to an Apple TV. The difference is that Apple has a traditional retail markup whereas it sounds like Raspberry Pi, being a charity, will be selling their product only barely above cost.

The Raspberry Pi sounds cool in concept. I should hope that the demo is unoptimized for now, perhaps the ceiling for the hardware is higher than we anticipate.

We're definitely not done with optimisation, which is why we're not launching right-now-this-minute. You'll be seeing improvements, which we'll be blogging about (we think development's fascinating, and that it's good for people to have a glimpse about what's involved with putting this sort of thing together) all the way up until we launch.

Count me excited. I'd love to see what the open source community can do to max out the hardware.

It's way past the 'concept' stage, they've got 50 boards up and running and there are tons of people that would fork over cash today to get themselves one or more of these.

Man, I'd love to get my hands on one. I have an Airport Express right now for streaming music from my Linux box to my home theater system, but it's just not working out.

All I need is a Linux-supporting little toy like this with audio out and WiFi (and which can decompress an MP3 in realtime).

If I had one, it would probably just end up putting Linux on it with MPD, which I could then be remotely control via mpc or ncmpc.

But the biggest problem for me would be figuring out what to do with the board itself. I've built PCs before but I wouldn't know what to put this board into or the best way to power it. And, of course, I would also have to overcome my lack of familiarity with ARM.

shut up and take my money!

I will most definitely buy one of these boards when they come out if even just to support the charity. That said I'm sure such a small functioning computer would no doubt come in handy down the road as well.

Does anyone know if either OpenBSD or NetBSD has been tried with this hardware yet? I didn't see any mention of it on the website, unless I simply overlooked it.

Brilliant.. I'm smiling. And will definitely be buying a few as soon as I can get my hands on them - plenty of educational and home uses spring to mind!

The especially nice thing is that last week when Raspberry Pi were mentioned here (a couple of times) there were some quite legitimate comments along the lines of "we've heard of the low cost PC before.. but they are all vapourware". So it is great to see a product that is all but on the market :)

I'm extremely excited about this project. Quick question: does anybody know if the foundation is planning on coordinating lesson plans, source code that people build for this, etc. I think starting an entire community around this could be great.

I'm reminded of the fantastic community that surrounds TI calculators/MSX Computers/Amiga Computers/Atari STs etc..

See http://www.ticalc.org/ as an example

Love the project, just one question: why $25 and not $95? Seems to me you're leaving $70 on the table for no apparent reason.

It's being developed by a non-profit foundation.

Because it's the price of a textboox.

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/why-a-25-pc-because-its-t...

I wonder what textbooks cost only $25.

In my experience they start at at least $50. As in, a book that would normally cost about $25 suddenly gets at least $25 slapped onto it the moment publishers realize it's being used as a text book (you can see this quite readily in CS/tech books with equivalent binding). The second publishers realize they have a captive audience they jack the price.

As I said in a previous Raspberry Pi thread[0], the comparison is supposed to be with high / school school textbooks, not college ones. School textbooks are cheaper than those used at university.

Raspberry Pi is a charity "to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level" and the device is aimed, in part at least, for use in teaching programming to children.[1]

$25 (roughly £15 at current rates) is a good rough price for a school textbook in the UK. A quick Amazon search shows this.[2]

Bear in mind, too, that the product is aimed in part at developing countries, where school textbooks may be cheaper.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2949932 [1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=2 [2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/school-textbooks-Books/s?ie=UTF8&...

Raspberry Pi is a charity "to promote the study of computer science [..]

By some HN comment standards, if that were really true, they'd be selling a $25 version of TAOCP.

(All these mentioned people who have access to school/family computers they can't play with because of the risk of breaking? They could use QEMU or VirtualBox and Linux right now).

"(All these mentioned people who have access to school/family computers they can't play with because of the risk of breaking? They could use QEMU or VirtualBox and Linux right now)."

Except that if you're the kind of person who doesn't have enough knowledge to set that up for your eight year old, are you really going to let them try and do it themselves?

There's a big difference between "Hey mum! My new teacher gave me this massive manual: can I install a whole load of programs you never heard of on the family computer?" and "Hey mum! My new teacher gave me this instead of a textbook. Can I borrow the tv to do my homework?"

It also skips the whole 3rd world scenario.

You can buy some @ $25 wrap it in a nice case, add in a keyboard + power supply and resell them for $95.

At $25 they will be helping a lot more people than just well-off geeks - this whole project a charitable after all.

I will be buying them for kids who would never have even touched a computer in their lives if not for these (and doing a bit of teaching). Since I am hardly Bill Gates, this would be completely impossible for me at $95 each (only giving them to 2-3 of these kids and leaving out the rest is just a bad idea in a slum).

Spending $95 on a PC does not make you "well off." I too would prefer that price point.

Granted, it may not make you a "well off" geek, but my point was - at $95, this would be a dream to most of the people who could benefit from it the most.

I am really looking forward to this - if only as a tool to use with the old CRT TVs I have lying around!

Also I wonder if there will be a $30-$50 dollar one that includes fully donating one (buy one give one) or any percentage along that route.

That said I'm sure there will be no end of charitable groups who will be raising money to by these for groups and schools.

1080p video with sound only recently improved from "FM radio" quality - what a strange combination.

You made me think about how audio has been generally far ahead of its technical development, so in theory maybe this just means that 44.1k 16-bit PCM is so ubiquitous and good enough that it is considered a pinnacle even though options that are better exists. I love my 192 kHz sample rate on my device, but admittedly this is for audio recording and ham radio, so, almost a scientific instrument really.

A $25 platform for scientific instruments would have tremendous benefits!

The article doesn't mention the HDMI sound, which was always high quality. The upgraded audio is from the 3.5mm jack, which means you can now run two high-quality streams at once - something that some people have been requesting.

Promoting a cheap computer for education/learning by demonstrating it playing Quake 3 and 1080p video - what a strange combination.

So it is capable of immersive 3d and high resolution video of fluid flow. Not strange at all.

My feelings exactly when reading the title. "CD quality" was great in the 80's and good in 90's. In 2010's it's certainly no high standard.

CD quality audio is good enough to play back through someone's old TV though isn't it. If you can afford speakers good enough to make the best of even this level of sound then they're probably not targeting you with the product. They're also going for high efficiency which may be part of the balance here.

Yeah, certainly CD quality is good, I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying that it's not anything to write headlines about (literally, in this case).

That a $25 USD computer can also have on-board audio that is CD quality is of note though isn't it? Probably not headline worthy like you said.

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